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Jackie Volbrecht's avatar

What am I trying to say here? Time is like that swimming pool and we spend an awful lot of it under the water, moving forward or around knowing that at some point we gotta come up for air. We have a brief moment of clarity when we pop out, take that breath, and go back down. I think those are the solid moments in life that we don’t have to scramble to recall.

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LavenderBlueMama's avatar

Omg. I just finished my absurdly long comment, & accidentally side swiped it into oblivion. I’ll try to recreate it, but who fucking knows if I am capable at this age.

At 55 I am right behind ya. Don’t wait up, I have no coordination, very little balance, & neuropathy destroys any proprioceptive input. I’ll stay back here languidly moseying.

I agree, it is very bizarre how time stretches, condenses, & blurs the further one gets from an occurrence. Pair that with post menopausal or manopausal brain fog & looking through the rear view mirror becomes an exercise of unexpected perplexity & questionable depth perception.

When I was young, my visual memories & my auditory memories were often linked & all were crystal clear. But now my auditory memories echo unattached & my visual memories sometimes feel like vertigo. And now I find myself Mr. Magooing through life.

Like your recurring dream, I have a waking image that stays in my mind that I believe represents my soul, my lifetime, & my memories. I am sitting alone in an empty, beautiful church. (Because of course. No matter how far I limp away, CHURCH remains a beckoning seemingly lovely facade that hides the putrid decay that rots beneath its surface.)

I am ageless (sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes ageless), happily looking up in awe. I am surrounded by countless stained glass windows, depicting significant scenes of my life. Suddenly, without warning, all the windows shatter inward one by one, raining shards of colored glass all over me & the sanctuary.

I am alarmed & wounded, but start the daunting task of gathering the bigger pieces, trying to identify & reassemble the scenes like a series of puzzles, ignoring the bleeding cuts on my hands. My efforts are infinitesimally successful & largely futile, so eventually I resign myself to collecting all the shards, even the tiniest ones that are crushed as I walk, to create a kaleidoscope.

I view the rest of my life through this kaleidoscope, which creates images that are ever-changing, shifting & beautiful in different ways than the scenes that were previously solid. Even though they are shattered, broken, crushed, salvaged shards, the glass reflects my lifetime & remains colorful & beautiful in a new way. Every once in a while I stumble across another piece & decide whether it fits in one of the puzzles or gets tossed into the kaleidoscope pile.

This church setting remains in my mind, but sometimes instead it morphs into a funhouse maze with distorted mirrors that I’m desperately trying to escape. But still the same thing still happens with the mirrors shattering, & me trying to collect all the pieces.

In both scenarios, I am alone, but am fearful that someone else will enter the sanctuary or the maze & further crush or steal the shards of my life before I can gather them all.

Typical that my mind conjures up an impossible important task to be completed before someone sinister enters the scene.

BTW, I love “Dude Looks Like A Lady,” Steven Tyler really goes all out, so to speak. The only downside is I end up destroying my vocal cords attempting to replicate his ad libs at the end. That’s the part that reminds me of the crows “Ca-ca-ca-ca Cow Cow!”

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